Last of the Magpies

by Mark Edwards

  They reached the upstairs landing. There were three doors, all shut. One was presumably a bathroom. Again, Jamie fought the urge to bolt. He could hardly see Kirsty’s face in the darkness but he wondered if she felt the same as him. He put a hand on her arm, ready to tell her they should go downstairs, that he was sure this was a trap, when a groaning noise came from inside the nearest room.

  Kirsty grabbed the handle and, without hesitation, entered the room. She felt for the light switch and turned it on.

  A woman lay on the bed, her wrists tied to the posts behind her. There was a gag in her mouth and, seeing them, she immediately began to make imploring noises in her throat.

  It was Emma.

  Jamie hurried over to her and pulled down the gag. She gasped, tried to speak, but nothing came out but a rasping sound.

  ‘Take it easy,’ he said quietly. ‘Who did this to you? Paul?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Where is he now?’

  She shook her head and tried to speak again, this time managing to get some words out. ‘I don’t know.’

  Jamie began to work at the ropes on her wrists but they were tied so tight they wouldn’t budge.

  Emma licked her lips. ‘I fell down the stairs. Even if you get me free, I can’t walk. I think I’ve sprained my ankle.’ She closed her eyes. ‘It hurts. It really hurts.’

  Jamie inspected her ankle. It was badly swollen. Possibly broken. He looked up at Kirsty, who was standing with her back to the door.

  ‘We need to call the police,’ he said.

  Kirsty, who seemed stunned by the sight of Emma, nodded and pulled her phone out of her pocket. Jamie turned back to Emma and, at that exact moment, she shouted, ‘Look out!’

  Jamie turned back to see Paul enter the room from behind Kirsty and pluck the phone from her hand.

  Jamie didn’t have time to be shocked by the sight of his old friend. He rushed across the room, but Paul grabbed hold of Kirsty and pulled her against him, her back to his chest, and put his forearm across her throat.

  ‘Back off,’ Paul hissed.

  Jamie froze for a second before groping in his pocket for his own phone. He found it but before he could unlock it, Paul said, ‘Drop it or I’ll crush her fucking throat.’

  He tightened the pressure on Kirsty’s windpipe and she made a horrible choking noise. Jamie immediately dropped the phone.

  ‘Kick it over here,’ Paul said.

  Jamie obeyed, and Paul let Kirsty breathe again.

  ‘Let her go,’ Jamie demanded. He looked over Paul’s shoulder. Where was Edmund? Had Paul done something to him already?

  ‘Just be patient,’ Paul said. He grinned, and it struck Jamie how terrible Paul looked. His hair was greasy and sweat dripped from his face. He was thin, too, like a walking skeleton.

  ‘You shouldn’t have come here,’ Paul said. He glared at Emma. ‘This bitch, then you two. Anyone would think I’d sent out invitations.’

  You two. Did that mean he didn’t know Edmund was here? Jamie tried to remain calm.

  ‘Is Lucy here?’ he asked, fighting to keep the tremor out of his voice.

  Paul smiled. ‘Yeah. She is.’

  Jamie had known it already, but hearing this confirmation was like a punch in the stomach. She was here. She was actually here. His nemesis. His obsession.

  Lucy.

  ‘Want to see her?’ Paul asked, keeping a firm grip on Kirsty.

  And all Jamie could do was nod.

  14

  Paul made Jamie exit the room first, then followed him out on to the landing, keeping a tight grip on Kirsty, his forearm still pressed against her throat. Jamie felt as if he were being carried along by fate, like nothing he could have done could have prevented this moment. Lucy, and his destiny, awaited at the end of this hallway.

  He had a strong feeling that only one of them, either him or Lucy, would leave this building alive, and a great sense of fatalism washed over him, as if he had no control over what was going to happen. It was in the hands of the universe. He was nothing but a pawn in a game played by a pair of bored gods.

  Emma’s moans of pain drifted after them, and Paul reached back and shut the door, muting her agony.

  ‘That’s better,’ he said. He nodded at Jamie. ‘It’s that door at the end. Open it and go inside slowly. No sudden movements or I’ll hurt Kirsty.’

  Jamie glanced at her. Hatred burned in her eyes. She clearly hadn’t surrendered to fate.

  ‘Come on. Get a move on.’ Paul pushed Kirsty along.

  ‘What happened to you?’ she said, her voice harsh and cracked.

  ‘To me?’ Paul said. ‘Lucy happened to me. She happened to all of us.’ He grimaced and a fresh bead of sweat ran down his face. It was plain to see that he was suffering. ‘Come on, don’t you want to see her? The door, Jamie.’

  Slowly, as he’d been instructed, Jamie pushed down the handle and opened the door. He stepped into the dark room, with Paul and Kirsty just behind him. There was still no sign of Edmund.

  The room smelled of stale sweat and urine and fear. He could hear breathing coming from across the room. Jamie hadn’t been expecting this. He thought he would be entering a room to find Lucy standing before him with a cruel smile on her face. Perhaps sitting in a chair, stroking a cat like some kind of Bond villain. He didn’t understand what was going on here.

  Not until Paul turned on the light.

  In an echo of what they’d found in the other room, Lucy was lying on a bed, her arms behind her and a gag in her mouth. It took a moment for Jamie to recognise her, as crazy as that seemed. Her hair had grown out since he’d last seen her, and, like Paul, she looked terrible. Malnourished, puffy and as pale as the walls of this room. If it hadn’t been for her eyes, and the way she stared at him, he might not have recognised her at all.

  ‘What the fuck is this?’ Kirsty said in a whisper.

  Paul let her go at last, pushing her away from him. He had a horrible smile on his damp face, a smile of insanity.

  ‘What do you want to do to her?’ he asked.

  ‘What?’ Jamie said.

  ‘Don’t act the innocent. Come on, you’ve been fantasising about getting revenge on her for years, haven’t you? For a year at least. Well, now’s your chance. You can do what you want to her. She’s helpless and weak and she can’t hurt you anymore.’

  With a new manic energy, he crossed the room to a wooden chest and took out a small knife, like one you would use to fillet a fish. Its blade glinted beneath the bare light bulb that hung above him.

  ‘Do you want to cut her? Hurt her? This knife slices through skin like it’s butter.’

  Paul walked towards Lucy and she flinched, closing her eyes. Paul laughed and offered the knife to Jamie.

  ‘Go on. Take out one of her eyes if you want. Slice her open. Cut off a toe. Do whatever you want.’

  For a moment, Jamie imagined it. Paul was right, he had wanted revenge. He had dreamed of it, fantasised about scenes in which Lucy was helpless, begging for mercy and forgiveness. He reached out a hand to take the knife, touched its handle with his fingertips. But in doing so, he was shaken from his fatalistic trance.

  He snatched his hand away.

  ‘No.’

  Paul raised his eyebrows.

  ‘This is wrong,’ Jamie said. ‘This is sick.’

  Across the room, Kirsty was staring at Lucy with horror, as if she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Jamie knew she would be feeling the same churning emotions as him. The conflict between hatred and compassion.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ she said.

  Paul’s attention snapped to Kirsty.

  ‘I’ll cut the bitch,’ she said.

  On the bed, Lucy made a noise of protest, shaking her head. It was a pitiful sight. Jamie had never thought he would feel such an emotion for Lucy, but there it was.

  ‘Kirsty, no,’ he said.

  ‘Shut up, Jamie.’ She reached out a hand towards Paul. ‘Give it to me.’

/>   Paul smiled. ‘You were always the stronger one. Jamie was always a wuss.’

  Jamie ignored the insult. He tried to step between them but Paul dodged him, moving to the other side of Kirsty.

  ‘What are you going to do to her?’ Paul said.

  ‘She killed my baby,’ Kirsty replied, laying a hand on her belly. A swell of sadness passed through Jamie. It filled the room. ‘Just give me the knife and I’ll show you what I’ll do.’

  Paul nodded enthusiastically and passed Kirsty the knife, handle first. ‘Do your worst.’

  ‘Kirsty, don’t.’

  ‘Jamie, I told you to shut up.’

  Was it his imagination or had her eyes turned black?

  She approached the bed, where Lucy cringed, shaking her head, making desperate noises behind her gag. Jamie tried to block Kirsty’s path but Paul grabbed him and pulled him away, pushing him hard against the wall.

  Kirsty was almost at the bed now, her eyes roaming across Lucy’s body, as if she were looking for the best place to start, the spot that would cause most pain. Lucy’s grunting grew louder and she strained at the cuffs that held her in place.

  ‘What are you most scared of, Lucy?’ Kirsty said in a whisper.

  She pulled down Lucy’s gag.

  ‘Come on, tell me. What are you afraid of?’

  Lucy didn’t speak. Jamie watched on helplessly as Paul jigged from foot to foot with excitement.

  Kirsty bent forward and held the tip of the knife against Lucy’s cheek. ‘Shall I take out an eye? Both eyes?’

  Lucy tried to speak but, like Emma before her, she appeared to have no saliva in her mouth. Her lips moved but no sound came out.

  ‘Are you scared of me?’ Kirsty asked.

  And when Lucy nodded, three things happened at once.

  One, Kirsty turned round and pointed the knife at Paul.

  Two, Paul said, ‘What are you—’

  Three, Edmund appeared in the doorway.

  Jamie was so fixated on what Kirsty was doing that he didn’t see Edmund at first. But then he became aware of a movement, of Edmund lifting his arm. Paul, who had his back to the door and his eyes on the knife, hadn’t seen Edmund at all.

  He didn’t see Edmund raise the gun he was holding.

  He wouldn’t have known a thing as Edmund shot him in the back of the head.

  15

  The sound of the gunshot deafened Jamie for several seconds. When he looked down he saw blood on his coat, a spatter of brains and more blood on the floor where Paul’s body lay. Kirsty, who must have seen Edmund enter the room and raise the gun, had ducked, but there was blood on her head and shoulders, glistening thick and red where it clung to her hair. Jamie fought back a wave of sickness.

  Edmund came into the room and glanced down at Paul.

  ‘Did you have to kill him?’ Jamie said, the ringing in his ears making his voice sound faint and far away. He was too shocked to wonder where Edmund had got the gun from.

  Edmund didn’t reply. Instead, to Jamie’s horror, he pointed the gun at Kirsty.

  ‘Put down the knife,’ Edmund said.

  Slowly, Kirsty did as he asked, and Edmund stepped around the body and picked it up, slipping it in his coat pocket.

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’ Jamie demanded.

  But again, Edmund ignored him. As Jamie and Kirsty looked on, both mouths open with shock, Edmund crossed the room and knelt on the floor by Lucy’s bed.

  ‘I found you,’ he said, his voice choked with emotion. ‘I finally found you.’

  He pushed himself up and kissed Lucy’s forehead and cheek.

  Jamie tried to make sense of it. Lucy and Edmund? Before he could process what he was seeing, Edmund grabbed a glass of water that Paul must have left by the bed and put it to Lucy’s lips. She drank, then gasped.

  Edmund kissed her lips, making a disgusting smacking sound.

  ‘The handcuffs,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, yes, of course.’ Edmund looked around. ‘Where are the keys?’

  ‘Paul’s pocket.’ Her voice was icy.

  ‘Yes, yes, obviously.’ He flapped across the room towards where Paul lay.

  Jamie stepped forward. ‘Edmund, don’t do this.’

  Edmund, who was crouched in a pool of blood, rifling through Paul’s pockets with one hand, lifted the gun’s nose towards Jamie. ‘Back off.’

  ‘Don’t set her free.’

  ‘What? Of course I’m going to set her free. I love her.’ He shot a sickly grin in Lucy’s direction. She looked back with amused pity, but Edmund didn’t seem to notice or care. He found a set of keys and went back across the room to the bed, unlocking both cuffs, left then right.

  Lucy sat up, gingerly rubbing at her shoulders and upper arms. She put her feet on the floor but didn’t stand up straight away. She didn’t look too weak, so Jamie assumed that Paul hadn’t kept her tied to the bed all the time.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Edmund said to her. ‘So sorry it took me so long to find you. I’ve been doing everything I could, following the police investigation . . . I’ve been trying for ages to get these two to get involved, thinking they might have information that would lead me to you.’

  ‘Didn’t you think of Paul?’ she said with disgust.

  He hung his head. ‘I emailed him and he replied saying that of course he had no idea where you were, that he hadn’t heard from you for ages. He seemed so genuine.’

  ‘You’re an idiot,’ Lucy snapped. She was getting her voice back now.

  ‘I know. I’m not worthy of you.’

  He waited, apparently hoping she would contradict him, but she didn’t.

  ‘Is that why you asked him to help you instead of me?’ he asked. ‘That’s why you asked him to meet you that night?’

  She grunted but didn’t speak.

  ‘You should have told me what you were planning,’ Edmund said, in that whining tone. ‘Then I would have known where to look. You should have known you could trust me. I love you so much.’

  He lifted her hand and tried to kiss it, but she pulled it away.

  ‘Let’s just get out of here,’ she said. ‘Do you have somewhere we can go?’

  He nodded. ‘I have a second property in the Cotswolds. It’s quiet. No nosy neighbours. We can stay there for a while before we get you safely out of the country.’

  ‘No one knew you were coming here?’

  ‘No.’

  Again, he tried to kiss her hand, and this time she allowed it.

  Jamie and Kirsty exchanged a glance. Jamie couldn’t be certain what Kirsty was thinking right now, but he imagined it was similar to him. Running through what had happened in his head. Edmund had clearly fallen in love with Lucy, just like Anita before him, but it was even clearer that Lucy didn’t feel the same way about him. She had used him before arranging for Paul to meet her after that night in Shropshire, and she was going to use Edmund again. He would probably end up like Anita when she didn’t need him anymore.

  But Lucy had made a huge mistake. She had thought Paul wanted to help her. She had no idea that he hated her and wanted revenge.

  He wondered what Paul’s ultimate plan had been. Was he going to keep her like this forever? Had he wanted to kill her but hadn’t been able to go through with it? They would probably never know for certain.

  And none of that mattered right now, anyway, did it? All that mattered was how he and Kirsty – and Emma, still tied to that bed in the other room – were going to get out of here alive.

  Edmund must have had a similar thought because he waved a hand at them and said, ‘What are we going to do with these two? And the other woman?’

  Lucy pushed herself up from the bed and stood motionless for a moment. She walked over to Jamie and tilted her head, looking him up and down. He tried to keep his face impassive, showing no emotion. She made a disgusted noise in her throat before turning and facing Kirsty, who stared at Lucy with naked contempt. Jamie couldn’t see Lucy’s face but he imagined he w
ould see amusement there.

  Finally, Lucy gazed down at Paul’s corpse. ‘Arsehole,’ she said, then spat on his back. ‘You’re going to have to kill them,’ she said to Edmund, who raised his gun – which Jamie now realised he must have brought to Sussex – moving it from side to side like he was playing eeny-meeny-miny-mo.

  ‘Which one first?’

  Both Jamie and Kirsty took a step back, Kirsty towards the wall on the left, Jamie to the right. He wanted to cross the room to join Kirsty. If they were going to die, and he really couldn’t see a way out of this, he wanted to be next to her. They had come so close to a reconciliation. He closed his eyes for a second and remembered their kiss in the pub. He would try to think of that in the moment of his death, to take a memory of happiness with him into the darkness.

  But when he tried to cross the room, Lucy said, ‘Stay there.’

  There was a little smile on her face now.

  ‘You know, it’s been so boring here. Listening to Paul rant on and on about how much he hated me, telling me about his dreams, and staring at these four bloody walls day in, day out. So dull. Do you know what I did to keep myself amused?’

  ‘Did you think about the nights we spent together?’ Edmund asked.

  Lucy rolled her eyes so hard that Jamie almost laughed.

  ‘I thought about the good times I had tormenting these two. It was so much fun. Frustrating at times, and of course it ended badly, but there were moments of . . .’ Her eyes shone with nostalgia. ‘Moments of pure satisfaction.’

  Edmund nodded enthusiastically. ‘I remember reading about it. You wrote so well. It’s a shame the world couldn’t read that version of your book.’

  Jamie had no idea what Edmund was talking about.

  ‘Maybe we should have a bit more fun before you kill them,’ Lucy said.

  It was obvious to Jamie that Kirsty was trying hard not to show fear. She said, ‘You’re so pathetic.’